


thy willing soul transpires

by mouseymightymarvellous



Series: tales of gutsy shinobi [13]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M, excerpts from the longfic i am never going to write
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:46:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24452326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/pseuds/mouseymightymarvellous
Summary: After everything, after it all, after the war and the loss and the devastation. After everything, Sakura still has yet to find the thing she will not survive.She's the only one left who remembers now. She does not remember enough.As she kisses Minato to ruin, she wonders if she will survive this.As she kisses Minato to ruin, she wonders if she is the only person who will end up surviving this.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura/Namikaze Minato
Series: tales of gutsy shinobi [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/712554
Comments: 10
Kudos: 94





	thy willing soul transpires

“So,” Minato says when they’ve cleaned up the debris from the fight and cared for the wounded and burned the bodies and settled the merchants and genin down for the night and secured the cargo and ensured that the camp perimeter is trapped within an inch of their lives, “do you have any other secrets I should know about?”

The forest is cool and dark around them as they keep watch within a particularly good bend of a tree that Sakura discovered on a delivery mission as a chūnin when she was fifteen the first time around, more than two decades from now. Minato is a shock of warmth along her side, and she’s trembling slightly from the adrenaline leaking out of her system and the brush of his coat sleeves catching against her thigh.

Despite herself, Sakura’s head tips back on a laugh, the sound of it piercing through the rain and the canopy above them.

“No,” she lies, “that’s the last one.”

_There are many places it starts._

_Sakura hates to make it about Sasuke, again, except she can’t undo all the ways it definitely comes back to Sasuke and his vengeance and his stupid fucking Uchiha eyes, so it starts with Sasuke and Sakura in a forest, ripping the Universe apart._

_But it starts, also, with Sakura fourteen years old and learning to carve legacy into her brow, with Uzumaki Mito standing in the face of the Kyuubi and binding a storm to her soul, with Hatake Sukomo finding a hurt child in the trees, with Hatake Kakashi turning down his second genin team—_

_Yes, there are many places it starts, but it also starts like this._

The door to the Hokage’s office opens and a group of harried looking scribes do everything but bolt out into the waiting area and then into the hallway and, Sakura presumes, as far from the building as they can manage. The Elders, when they exit, don’t look as harried but look a fair bit grumpier. Not the most productive of meetings, then.

Sakura is very happy to say this is not her problem.

Namikaze smiles winsomely as they shuffle past, before glancing at the now open door where they can see the Hokage tiredly waving him in.

He turns the smile on Sakura, and while its brightness doesn’t dim a whit, it does warm from a winter morning sun—crisp and bright and blinding—to a slow afternoon laze, enough to sink into if you were to let yourself.

Sakura adamantly does not.

She bares her teeth in answer.

“The Hokage is waiting for you, Namikaze-san. I would arrive only a few minutes before your next meeting, so that you don’t waste your time again.”

“Haruno-san,” he beams at her, “it’s never a waste of my time when it’s spent with you!”

This, Sakura realizes, is why Mist nin sharpen their teeth to points.

“I’m a busy woman, I don’t always have the time to entertain you. Despite what you fancy field operatives think, the village runs on paperwork and it certainly doesn’t get done on its own.”

“Haruno-san!” Namikaze exclaims, hand to his heart. “I would never even think to dishonour you or your compatriots so! But you are very right, next time I should just take you out for drinks. What do you say, tomorrow night?”

Sakura doesn’t keep a sword strapped to the underside of her desk, because nice little secretaries, even nice little secretaries who are—on paper—low level chūnin, don’t keep swords strapped to convenient pieces of office furniture so that, when needed, they can behead irritating presumptive Yondaime-to-bes. Unfortunately.

Tonight she is going to pull out a file and get to work sharpening so that next time the lack of a sword won’t hold her back.

“Minato,” a dry voice cuts in, “my time is precious in my old age, and I have wasted enough of it this afternoon. If you would leave poor Sakura-chan alone before she ensures you die a slow and painful death by one thousand paper-cuts, then I might get to go home to my wife at some point tonight.”

Namikaze sighs, and raps his knuckles on the edge of Sakura’s desk, before quickly pulling his hand back and smoothing it against his thigh as he catches Sakura’s venomous scowl and aborted grab for a pen to stab the offending appendage with.

“Tomorrow night?” he tries again.

“Not to let the needs of the village interfere with your flirting, children, but I have a mission for you, Minato, and you won’t be available any time soon.”

Well, Sakura resigns herself, if you are going to kill one Hokage, what’s a second one on the list?

“Rain check then.” Namikaze nods decisively. “I’ll let you know when I’m back in the village.”

Sakura studiously shuffles piles of paperwork. “No.”

“What kind of flowers do you like?” he asks as he walks backwards towards Hiruzen standing in the doorway of his office. “I wouldn’t want you to miss me too badly!”

“I hope someone stabs you while you’re away!” Sakura shouts back at him, and she absolutely does not catch his grin as the door slams shut in his face.

There’s a beat of quiet, as Sakura shoves down what is most definitely murderous intent and not a blush. A blush of murderous intent, maybe.

“Wow,” Yoshino drawls from behind her Ibex mask. “You were right. You totally don’t want to fuck that man.”

The pen embeds in the wooden wall with a very satisfying sound, and Yoshino pushes herself back to standing.

Badger snickers, and then instinctively flinches as Sakura swings her gaze to him.

“I hate both of you,” Sakura declares, “and next time we spar, I am going to rip your spines out.”

_The world ends ignominiously._

_None of it is worth repeating, so Sakura doesn’t tell._

_There’s no one to tell._

_The world ends._

_Sakura doesn’t._

_Maybe that’s where it starts._

They’re half-way through a war that was won before Sakura was ever born.

Sakura knows how this all ends, except for the fact that she is here, now, and so she has no idea how this will end.

Taking watch along the perimeter when the coals have burned low and her unit is sleeping the way you learn to sleep—fast and hard and dizzy with half-remembered screams and the mud in your nose and the blood under your nails—when every beat of your heart is a war drum; yes, it’s all too familiar. (Until it wasn’t. Until there was— But Sakura doesn’t like to remember that. Sakura knows how this ends. She’s the only one left alive who does.)

It’s a shock, when suddenly there’s a weight dropping over her shoulders, all scratchy warmth, and it’s the absence of violence in her mouth that has adrenaline spiking in her veins.

She didn’t notice him.

How did she not notice him?

How has she let it get to this point? Minato an extension of her limbs, so known to her that she doesn’t have to be thinking to know where he is in space in relation to her.

“This is familiar,” he says as he sits down next to Sakura, their thighs flush as she shifts to give him what room she can on the branch she’s perched herself on.

“Fewer traumatized genin this time,” Sakura answers, giving in to the shared remembrance and only hating herself a little bit for it.

“Fewer traumatized chickens,” Minato agrees.

Sakura shudders.

So many chickens.

Thank all the gods and spirits that genjutsu work on chickens or they never would have gotten that merchant caravan through bandit country.

The moon is a bare sliver in the sky, and Sakura closes her eyes to sink down into an almost meditative state.

There are creatures moving in the night, hunting, but none of them have a care for the group of Konoha shinobi sleeping, tucked into trees. Sakura tracks them through space, ever watchful for the presence of something watching back.

It isn’t vision. Maybe a spider in her web would understand if Sakura were to try to explain what it is to breathe in time to the exhalation of chakra around her, but there are not words enough, at least none that Sakura has ever managed to string together.

Pressed along her side, Minato is a lightning strike unending or the start when you wake suddenly from a deep slumber or the moment between two opposing magnets before they snap together.

“I’ve missed you,” Minato says, and Sakura doesn’t have time for this, she’s never had time for this, there certainly isn’t time for this when they are half-way through a war that was won before Sakura was ever born and she is on watch and any minute now she might slip and this will all be ruin and she will be all that is left. Again.

“Don’t,” Sakura says, or Sakura sobs, or Sakura only thinks with the intensity of all the chakra crowning her brow and it races along the tie between them to echo in reflection in the soft hollows of their mouths, unspoken but heard.

Minato turns into her, pressing a kiss to her temple.

It’s a brand.

It’s a blessing.

“Okay,” Minato breathes. “Okay.”

“I can’t.” Sakura wants to explain. Sakura cannot explain.

Minato chuckles, bitter and night-heavy and ringing with war drums. “One day,” he asks, “will you tell me all your secrets?”

“No,” Sakura lies.

It catches around her throat like a noose.

“Okay,” Minato agrees.

She wonders if he knows.

He is warm against her side. Lightning bolts and magnets.

Sakura knows how this all ends, except for the fact that she is here, now, and so she has no idea how this will end.

_Sakura wakes to a familiar hospital with hands that are too small and grief and rage and knowledge wrapped around her throat._

_A man who is not Hatake Kakashi is sleeping in a tipped back chair next to her bed._

_If nowhere else, it starts right here._

_As Sakura will soon learn all too well: it is always starting, it is always already starting, it is always already here._

As she suspected, kissing Minato tastes like ruin.

“This is a mistake,” Sakura gasps into his mouth.

Minato freezes. Sakura’s fingers wrapped around his wrists are the only things that keep his hands from slipping away from where, just moments ago, they were tangled in her hair.

“I’m the most selfish person in all of existence,” Sakura confesses to him.

“What—” Minato croaks. “What could you possibly be taking that isn’t yours to keep?”

Sakura smiles against the tears in her eyes, the grief in her throat, the fury in her bones. It must be a ghastly slash across her mouth, because Minato closes his eyes against the sight.

“You,” Sakura tells him, “I’m stealing you.”

“Oh.” It’s not a sunny smile, that sits in the soft curve of his mouth, but Sakura wants to live in it. “Oh, Sakura, don’t you know? I’m yours. I’m yours to keep.”

Sakura presses up into him again, helpless to do anything but try to kiss that terrible oath from his tongue, kiss that terrible smile from his lips.

He doesn’t know.

He doesn’t know, because Sakura is the only one left alive to know.

She’s three weeks out from being born, and he has no idea how she has already stolen so much more than was ever hers to hold.

“I’m yours,” Minato swears. “I love you. I’ve loved you for years. And you never need to tell me all your secrets, you just need to let me keep you.”

Sakura kisses him.

She doesn’t dare anything else.

She doesn’t know if she were to promise him, if it would be a truth or a lie.

She doesn’t know which would be worse.

So Sakura kisses him.

And hopes, in the end, she is not the only one left to remember this.

_Maybe this is where it starts._

_Maybe this is where it ends._

_Sakura doesn’t know—she hasn’t lived it yet._

_Sakura doesn’t know, and that is its own weight._

_But, well, she hasn’t met anything that could kill her yet. And there are war drums beating. And there is no time to waste._

_All this time, and all she can count on is this next breath._

_There are many places it starts._

_It starts like this:_


End file.
